


Sleeper Beauty

by elle_you_oh, itsamagicalplace



Series: A Modern Retelling [3]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tales, F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-31
Updated: 2014-12-31
Packaged: 2018-03-04 11:06:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3065573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_you_oh/pseuds/elle_you_oh, https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsamagicalplace/pseuds/itsamagicalplace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a young Melinda May spares Phil Coulson’s life, she blows her cover at Hydra, and is sent to live under a false identity with three body guards, until the threat is eliminated. Years later, she winds up on the operating table of the man she had once saved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleeper Beauty

“Is this punishment for breaking protocol?”

The deputy director of SHIELD, Agent Peggy Carter looked up from the classified files littering her desk to find her youngest protégé, and a major source for her migraines standing in her office.

She didn’t regret recruiting Melinda May; that girl had topped all of her classes at the academy and excelled in all areas of training. It was shame that for all the achievements and honors she received in her classes, she was still every bit a delinquent.

Agent Carter had kept a close watch over her charge during her days training at the SHIELD academy, and had found as many complaints as there were praises. Things hadn’t changed since that girl had graduated and begun working as an agent of SHIELD; several of the senior agents had filed complaints about dye in their shampoo, harmless viruses on their computers of rabbits in the spring time and the list went on.

No one had managed to catch her in the act, but Peggy Carter wasn’t just anybody. She knew that it had been Agent May, likely with the assistance of Agent Barton. Those two wreaked  havoc all over headquarters whenever they were together; but their pranks were harmless and Peggy had no intention of punishing her for her actions.

Disobeying direct orders in the field; well, that was an entirely different matter.

“You revealed your identity whilst undercover at Hydra.”

The younger woman shuffled her feet and Peggy allowed herself a small smile; at least she had the decency to realise the severity of her actions.

‘You were assigned to gather intel yet you came back with nothing.”

Peggy had now ditched her paperwork completely, and her arms crossed and was looking directly at Melinda whose own gaze was cast at the ground.

‘You are directly responsible for the injury for eight of the twelve agents that were sent in as an extraction team.”

Melinda tensed up as Peggy rose from her seat and made her way across the room until she was standing directly across from her.

“And you saved all twenty two doctors and scientists in that lab.”

Peggy placed finger beneath Melinda’s chin, forcing the younger woman to look up at her.

“You’re being reassigned to administration for your safety. You’re being relocated to protect you. You have guards not because we believe you can’t defend yourself, but because SHIELD is well aware of your track record in regards to rules.”

As Peggy spoke she looked down into the eyes of her brightest pupil and once again saw the seventeen year old girl she had recruited to SHIELD several years ago.

“I am taking these measures not as a punishment, but because I am proud of you, and I care for you.”

 

* * *

 

“Vic, it’s your turn to do the groceries,” Natasha called as she rummaged through the almost empty fridge.

“I did them last week, it’s Maria’s turn.”

The voice carried through from down the hallway in their two bedroom apartment on the twelfth floor.

They had been at this location for several months now, this time with Victoria as a travelling author just stopping in town until she finished her current novel, accompanied by her younger sisters Natasha and Maria, and Natasha’s college roommate, Melinda.

In the beginning, when Melinda and Natasha had managed to pass for teenagers, Maria and Victoria had posed as a middle-aged lesbian couple with two adopted daughters - but that had been several years back, and they’d been at over a dozen locations from the beginning till now, under the orders of deputy director Carter.

Of course, for them to easily pass as siblings, all three of Melinda’s guards had dyed their hair to match one another - Maria had kept her natural brown whilst Victoria had lost the pink streaks and Natasha’s was no longer a vibrant shade of red.

“I’d do the shopping if you’d let me go outside,” Melinda called as she walked into the kitchen, an empty mug in hand.

“Mel, you know the rul-”

“Yes. No leaving the apartment unless one of you is with me, I know.”

‘And n-

“No public places with lots of traffic, I know.”

Natasha closed the fridge door and turned to Melinda.

‘Deputy Director Carter just wants to protect you, and so do we.”

“I know.”

 

* * *

 

**SHIELD Emergency Communication**

**SHIELD Classified Level 8**

**13 24 men teams sent in to Hydra Headquarters**

**Location: Classified**

**Status: Unknown**

**Extraction: — — —**

 

* * *

 

“Agent Carter, we have a problem.”

“What is it Agent Hand?”

“An hour before the infiltration of Hydra, Agent Romanoff was reassigned to Strike Team Delta and Agent Hill and I were called in by Agent Fury.”

“I’m well aware Agent Hand, I gave the orders myself.”

“Agent May-

“We assigned a team to bring her back to Headquarters.”

“About that… I just arrived back at the apartment to collect the rest of our supplies and intel.”

“Agent Hand-”

“I found the team you sent. They’re a bit tied up at the moment. Agent May is gone.”

 

* * *

 

The lead up to the final showdown with Hydra was a long one - several agents on both sides had lost their lives in the process, even more injured. Neither team had escaped unscathed, but the good had prevailed in the end and the Kraken and Hydra had been defeated.

It was all over the news after the head of Hydra was gunned down and his henchmen were picked off one by one by SHIELD. Several Hydra bases across the globe were stormed by SHIELD teams and many of their supporters were brought to justice and had been put behind bars.

There were already stories flying around about how one agent, whose status and identity were unknown, had entered Hydra after the SHIELD teams and had assisted them in bringing the organization down.

Of course, all of this was public knowledge - any finer details had been immediately classified and labelled for SHIELD’s eyes only.

Dr. Phillip Coulson of General Hospital had been keeping up to date with any and all news involving Hydra and SHIELD since his capture by Hydra during his surgical residency. At that time he had been working with a team of brilliant scientists to engineer cures for various diseases, and they had all been taken hostage along with their research.

His superiors had been forced to manufacture deadly diseases through reverse engineering of the cures that they had spent their entire careers working towards. Phil had only assisted, but that was enough to see the terror that Hydra sought to unleash upon the rest of the world.

There was a group of Hydra agents assigned to constantly keep watch over them.

One young woman, she had caught his eye from the moment he first saw her.

She carried herself with an air of confidence, her gaze was unwavering even as some of his colleagues slurred insults at her and the organization she represented.

She was tiny, delicate in her appearance.

But he had learnt within minutes of meeting her that she was every bit as lethal as she was beautiful.

She was a constant in his life, those three months he was held at that Hydra base; sometimes she brought them their meals.

The other agents would laugh and jeer as they beat members of his team up; but she never even cracked a smile, she never spoke.

He was enamoured, but cursed himself for it. She was evil, she was Hydra; and he, well, he was an idiot.

When his turn came around to be thrown around by the Hydra goons, she had stood on the side lines, watching, until they had dragged him back to his temporary residence, a small closed in cell-like room.

She’d appeared, not ten minutes later, with a furrow in her brow and a bag of medical supplies under her arm as she slipped into his room.

Despite his protests that he was a doctor, and had been through medical training, she’d rolled her eyes at him and tended to his wounds, patching him up with a gentle hand before slipping out of the room, leaving him sitting at the edge of his cot with a pink flush upon his cheeks.

He could often feel her gaze on him as he worked in the lab, and she continued to patch him up after her fellow agents found reasons to beat him up.

In all the time that he had spent in her presence, he never heard her speak a single word until the day it was revealed that she was a double agent loyal to SHIELD.

She single handedly took down the Hydra agents within the lab; and a team of SHIELD agents had busted in to rescue them.

She’d taken his arm and handed him off to one of the SHIELD agents, but not before looking him in the eye and uttering just three words.

“Stay alive, promise?”

He hadn’t had a chance to respond when he was wrestled off into an awaiting aircraft as she ran back into the building to help the rest of his team escape.

Those words and the image of her as she spoke them to him were ingrained in his mind, and there wasn’t a day gone by that he didn’t think of her.

His saviour.

He’d never even learnt her name.

 

* * *

 

As the trauma surgeon on call, Phil was paged when any urgent cases came in.

“Dr. Coulson, you’re needed in the ER. 911.”

Phil stripped the gloves from his hands, and removed his mask, taking a deep breath.

“Simmons, you close up here, Fitz you’re with me,” he directed to two of his fourth year residents as he headed towards the door, pulling off his scrub cap as he did.

They raced down the hall and out into the emergency room, Phil’s eyes darting around to find who had paged him.

“Coulson.”

Dr. Triplett, the young head of cardiothoracic surgery raised his arm as a signal, and Phil hurried over into one of the smaller rooms off to the side, Fitz trailing him.

“Unidentified female, late twenties/early thirties, GSW to the chest and abdomen, multiple stab wounds, there’s shrapnel, she appears to have been caught in a blast zone.  We’ve transfused a pint of O-Neg, signs of a head injury, Dr. Morse has ordered a CT, but we’ll have to operate on her as-

“Coulson, are you listening?”

He wasn’t.

He had frozen the second he had entered the room and laid eyes on the woman lying on the table.

Almost a decade had passed since he last saw her, but even beneath the dried blood and wounds he recognised her face.

“Dr. Triplett, OR3 is prepped and ready to go.”

A loud beeping noise accompanied the nurses’ words, and Phil broke free from his thoughts.

“Doctors, she’s coding.”

 

* * *

 

Seven hours.

As a trauma surgeon, Phil generally spent less time in the OR than other surgeons, and frequented the ER.

But this was a special case, and he’d stayed and assisted as Trip restarted her heart, and Mack, the general attending tended to her abdominal wounds.

She’d coded a further three times whilst on the table, and each time Phil had heard the continuous peal of the heart monitor he could feel his own racing.

They’d closed her up just minutes before, she was stable but Morse had made the call to put her into a medically induced coma to allow her body to recover from the trauma.

They were exiting the operating room when they were stopped by a big black man with an eye patch, and an older woman with grey streaks in her dark brown hair.

“I’m Agent Carter, deputy director of SHIELD. This is Agent Fury. We will be transporting Agent May to a SHIELD facility for further medical examinations; we thank you for saving her life.”

She had a posh British accent, very different to the one of Dr. Hunter from Plastics.

“No, you can’t take her.”

Phil stepped forward past his co-workers, staring the woman down.

“Doctor. This isn’t up to you.”

“Respectfully ma’am, sir, as you said yourselves, we operated on her and saved her life. We’d like to monitor her through her recovery.”

It was Trip who spoke this time, looking between the two SHIELD agents as he did so. The woman appeared as though she were about to object once again, until Phil spoke up for a second time.

“Nearly ten years ago, she saved my life. Rescued me and my team from Hydra. Still haven’t thanked her.”

His voice was shaking, and both the SHIELD agents were looking at him with knowing looks upon their faces.

“She can stay. Provided we can keep our guards posted outside her room. Strike Team Delta can be reassigned for this.”

Agent Carter, who appeared to be the higher ranking of the two spoke more to her companion than to the doctors in front of them.

Agent Fury made a sound akin to a snort, and it appeared that the discussion was over.

 

* * *

 

As soon as he was on a break, Phil could be found in room 325 at the bedside of Melinda May.

Melinda May.

Even her name was beautiful.

He talked to her a lot, babbled really.

He could feel the amused stares from Strike Team Delta, Melinda’s guards, a pair of sarcastic agents who conversed mainly through eye rolls, snorts and scoffs.

Bobbi had stopped administering the drug to keep her under earlier in the morning, and had he calculated it correctly, she would be waking up soon.

He wanted to be there when she did, he wanted to hold her hand and tell her that he’d kept her promise and to thank her.

But he’d been paged away to the ER and had been stuck there for hours. By the time he’d changed out of his bloodied scrubs and taken a quick shower, it was already night fall.

As he took the familiar path to Melinda’s room, he noticed that her guards were absent from their post, and he picked up his pace, almost reaching a sprint as he turned in to the room.

The sight that awaited him sent a warm fuzzy feeling through him.

Natasha and Clint are sitting together at her bedside, and Melinda’s awake, sitting propped up with several pillows.

They’re talking in hushed whispers, and Natasha’s smirking and Clint is chuckling, but Melinda remains stoic as ever.

Until he makes his presence known with a soft knock on the door and she looks up, meeting his eyes.

And a small smile appears on her face.

“You kept your promise,” she says softly as he approaches the bed.

Natasha and Clint, now back in agent mode, slink out of the door in the blink of an eye and shut it behind them with ne’er a sound.

Melinda reaches a hand for him as he sits down beside her, and he gently takes both her hands into his larger ones, stroking her knuckles with his thumbs.

“You saved my life. I know it’s about ten years too late, but thank you,” Phil says, unable to control the smile breaking on his face.

His heart skips a beat when her smile grows a little, and she removes one of her hands from within his grasp before lacing their fingers together.

“I heard you saved mine.”

Phil wants to point out that what he did for her was insignificant compared to she did for him, but held his tongue.

“I called you my Sleeper Beauty for years you know, in my head. I never knew your name. But I much prefer Melinda,” he confesses, embarrassed.

She raises an eyebrow at him and he shakes his head.

“It’s stupid I know, but you were a spy and I’d never seen anyone so beautiful..” he’s babbling now, and she lets out a small laugh as he speaks.

It’s the most wonderful sound he’s heard in years.

‘Were you planning to wake me with a kiss Dr. Phillip?” she says jokingly, letting out another laugh but silencing as he releases her hands and stands up.

Before she can get another word in, he’s leaning in, bracing himself with his left arm against the bed frame as he cups her cheek with his right hand and presses his lips against hers.

Its short and sweet; he doesn’t want to aggravate her injuries.

She’s smiling at him, she hasn’t stopped since he entered the room, and he’s so happy right now he just wants to run up and down a crowded street and shout it for the world to know.

She’s shuffled over a little, allowing him room to sit on the edge of the bed. Her right hand is in his left, his right on her shoulder as he peppers her face with kisses, drawing laughter from her.

 

* * *

 

Eight years later, after Phil has been promoted to Chief of Surgery and Melinda has retired from active duty, they tell the story of Sleeper Beauty and her handsome Dr. Phillip to their daughter Skye, who relishes every moment.


End file.
